Boston's Tech Plan Puts Other Cities To Shame

Businesses don’t exist in a vacuum—they depend on the cities and
towns they’re located in. As businesses shop around for the best
location to set up shop, cities are becoming more innovative and
responsive to their needs in order to attract and keep the
entrepreneurs and small-business owners who drive their
economies.

At a conference sponsored by SAP and the
Brookings Institution in December, the chief information
officers of the cities of Boston and Edmonton spoke about what
they’re doing to make their cities more innovative, and more
attractive for businesses.

Attracting Businesses

The first step, obviously, is to make the basics great.
As Bruce Katz, another panelist at the conference who runs
the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings
Institution, says, “If you ask a particular citizen
or business located in Boston or a suburb of Boston why they
stay, they’ll tell you they want clean streets, they want safe
streets, they want good schools, they want fluid traffic and
transport options, they want a government that’s actually
transparent.”

Cities are using technology to deliver. Boston, for
example, is providing a large amount of data on
government performance in areas that are useful to small
businesses, such as inspections and foreclosures. The city has
also previously made codes and regulations accessible online for
businesses.

Boston has even created an office to build upon these ideas
and partnerships. Bill Oates, Boston’s CIO, calls the
city’s Office Of New Urban Mechanics ”a place
for us to experiment. We source ideas. We take some of those
ideas and we pilot them, we create products, we create services,
we find new ways to approach old problems—the solutions that
work, we will find a way to scale."

The end goal, according to Oates, is that businesses and
citizens will be able to tell cities what data they want and
need; they’ll work with these kinds of offices to make it happen.
For businesses, that means the office will give them access to
opportunities and resources in their city.

City Partnerships

In these scenarios, Oates says the city will link
entrepreneurs with the Office of New Urban Mechanics, “because
that is where we open the door to City Hall.”

Say, for example, you produce an app, or want to get your
service into city schools or another part of the city’s
operations—the Office of New Urban Mechanics will help you find a
partner in the area to help you grow. This approach isn’t limited
to Boston; Philadelphia recently opened its own Office of New
Urban Mechanics.

And it seems to be working. Boston’s office has
already worked with a local business to create an app
that detects bumps in streets and sends that information to the
city to help improve infrastructure.

You can already see these partnerships in action in other
ways: MyLife List,
a startup company, won a contest run by the city,
earning $50,000 in equity investment to expand in Boston’s
innovation district.

Cities have long been aware of the essential role small
businesses play, and even have wanted to help. The difference
today is, the most forward-looking cities are actually reaching
out to businesses with data, expert knowledge and partnership,
rather than just words.